


a little bit stronger (again)

by komet



Category: Turn (TV 2014)
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Blood and Injury, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Implied Anna Strong/Abraham Woodhull, Implied Caleb Brewster/Benjamin Tallmadge, Implied Relationships, Implied/Referenced Torture, M/M, Missing Scene, POV Alternating, Revised Version
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-02
Updated: 2020-09-02
Packaged: 2021-03-06 21:47:40
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,649
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26255878
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/komet/pseuds/komet
Summary: It isn’t her grief that matters right now.It’s Abe’s, and it’s Caleb’s, and maybe it’s even Ben’s. They are lost, breaking, and drowning respectively, though she suspects that all three words could apply to each of them.What is she, then? What is her role in this grand tailspin?( in the aftermath of caleb's return from capture, all four spies are deeply shaken. they offer what small comforts they can to each other. )
Relationships: Anna Strong/Abraham Woodhull, Caleb Brewster/Benjamin Tallmadge
Comments: 2
Kudos: 7





	a little bit stronger (again)

**Author's Note:**

> this is a revised version of my previous work, which can be found here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11296530

Anna's head has been all but spinning ever since Ben told her about Caleb.

She was furious, when she first heard -- well, that isn't right. She was terrified first and foremost, and the anger followed like a phantom. By now, she's set aside her grievances with Ben and his secrecy to focus on the most pressing of their concerns.

Caleb's never been captured before, has never even come close despite being easily the most daring among them. It doesn't quite feel real, and she finds that she can't even paint a proper picture of it in her head. Caleb, with his deadly hatchets and true aim; Caleb, with his booming voice and bright eyes; Caleb, _her_ Caleb, captured and bound by redcoat devils. She could sooner envision him taking down a whole brigade before being stolen away by one.

In any case, the fury has taken a backseat to the anxiety. 

Nervous tension consumes every bit of Anna Strong's waking mind, and she finds that any logical bit of reason does little to soothe it like it ought to. The crux of the thing is, there are just so few angles from which to look at the situation in any optimistic light. She seeks them out regardless.

Arnold, as the newly named _Spyhunter General_ , is undoubtedly on thin ice; he will be desperate, deliberate, and it's surely made him a more dangerous bloodhound than they are willing to reckon with; on the other hand, it is this same desperation which ought to compel him to handle a rebel officer with exceeding care. The man's a coward, sure enough, but when it comes to self-preservation, he's proved to be no fool. He will not overstep his boundaries, lest he risk facing Clinton's wrath. He will not hang Caleb without confession, will not harm him without consequence, and so, he has nothing. 

Caleb will be fine.

He will emerge from the quagmire of his capture with that same amused sparkle in his eye, barking with laughter about how ridiculous Arnold must look in that coat. He will be reveling in that he finally got to spit in the turncoat's face, boasting his scrapes and bruises, and he will not have given away anything at all. 

Caleb is just like that. Always has been. It is simply fact at this stage, that he can come out of _anything_ alright, seeing as Anna can't remember it ever being any different. Not even when they were children. 

She recalls with a rare smile, being twelve years old and harping at Caleb as he poked relentlessly at a beehive. When his arm ended up swollen and blistered, he hadn't shed even a single tear (although Abe had). He's always been the strongest of them in many ways and _this_ , she thinks, is certainly among them. He is simply too large a presence to be dimmed by something this ... this _small_.

It is a rather artificial sense of security which calms her, but it is there all the same. It reminds her of Ben, ironically enough.

He has been handling the whole thing with an almost entirely opaque manner of calm, but Anna knows better. He's hardly keeping it together; she can tell. 

Maybe nobody else can, maybe anybody else would tell her that she's seeing something that is not there, but she knows that Ben’s got open wounds here, and that the vultures are circling, waiting for him to drop. What with Arnold's defection and André's hanging, rumblings of a mutiny and a very snappy General Washington, the sudden kidnapping of his best friend must be a nigh-debilitating blow.

She's almost surprised that he hasn't imploded by now, to be quite frank. However, the operating word there is _almost_ , because Ben is about as willful as they come. If he wants to keep holding on, then he’s going to. Even if it’s by the skin of his teeth.

All the same, Anna knows better than to try to talk to him about any of it. She isn't Caleb; she can't get Ben to listen the way that he can. He's a stubborn thing, and proud, too. He won't ever let on that he's breaking, and maybe he's still even goading himself into believing that he isn't. She's decided, then, that she ought to leave well enough alone, give him the space to put a lid on this. 

And he will, of course. She knows that he will do whatever it takes.

They are going to get Caleb back, he will be okay, and they will make sure nothing like this can happen again. He will be back here soon, hugging her and teasing about how she and Ben worry too much. That will be very soon, in fact; she only has to wait for Ben's return. This private, self-made promise just barely manages to satiate the rattling shriek of impending doom at the edges of her mind. Small victories. 

**. . .**

As it is, 'very soon' begins to feel like eternities. 

She tends to her cart distractedly, with a far-off gaze like she's gone for days without rest. The anxiety is an unrelenting pressure, writhing through her chest and booming to be allowed in. She doesn't let it; she knows that if she does, she will quite likely lose her grip of it in a way that is too permanent. 

This is the risk they run, all of them, and they've known it from the start. This had been bound to happen. It's a bleak thing, but somberness is easier to swallow than terror. 

After hours, several more than Ben had projected, she's sure that they've taken too long. 

( They could be dead, the wickedest corner of her mind provides. Ben, Caleb, and Abe too. Assassinated, ambushed, captured, hanged. _Dead_. )

It's an unequivocal and unexpected mercy, really, that she's got ever-persisting duties to attend to here. It keeps her thoughts occupied, for moments and minutes at a time. 

Eventually, the dreadful waiting is over.

Vigilant brown eyes snap toward the first sign of a flurry of movement, and she recognizes it for what it must be immediately. There is Ben, wrapped in a black coat, wild-eyed and covered in blood; he is heavily supporting the weight of a man who looks as good as dead dragging along beside him; they vanish into the Major's tent in the time that it takes her stomach to sink. 

That was Caleb. Had to be.

Immediately, carelessly, she drops the pot in her hands and makes her way out from behind her cart. Her heartbeat is a steadily rising anthem of dread and nerves, stalking toward its cruel crescendo as she nears the tent. She doesn't know what she is going to see, doesn't know if she actually wants to see it at all. There is only one choice, though, when the stakes are what they are. She has to know, and so she pushes into the tent looking much braver than she feels.

Her heart drops in sync with the freezing of her limbs, as though she is made of lead. 

Ben is helping to ease the man down onto a cot, and it is unquestionably Caleb, but it can't be. This man is bloodied and gashed up, this man is feeble and grunting in pain as he lets go of Ben; he is trembling slightly, and he looks as though he might fall over and die at the blink of an eye. This man does not look like Caleb, their Caleb...

There are no words to properly describe the expression on her face; shock coupled with fear, sadness married to concern. It's all the same.

She can't quite get a word out at first, but she's about to try anyway. It's Caleb that beats her to it.

"Hey, Annie," he croaks, hardly conscious and more than a touch delirious. 

His voice is...slight, considering the sort of man he is. That lively sound of Caleb's raucous singing, the lightness and cheer and _confidence_ in his voice -- none of that seems to fit quite right with this. What's more still, is that when she meets his eyes, she has a vague thought that she hears her own heart break. Emotion bubbles up in her throat and she wastes no more time, hurrying forward to drop down by his side.

Ben is immediate in backing up as needed, eyes set on the floor. Anna has a mind for it, but not by much.

"Caleb," she says softly instead, sounding more pained than she would have liked but less so than she expected. There is a lot happening behind her delicate features that have twisted in anguish; it manifests itself in hot pools behind her eyes, but the tears do not yet fall.

Caleb responds with a thin smile, and it reaches his eyes, but in the wrong way. It isn't his usual sparkle, not that flare of mischief and adventure; no, it's far more distant, far sadder than that. 

"No need for that," he soothes, though there is little comfort to be had. "I'm alright." 

There is nothing in his condition to suggest that he is; his hand is shaking as it reaches for hers. Anna cracks, tears welling up in her eyes as she purses her lips; it's incorrigible, this tightness in her chest as she takes Caleb's hand. 

"Ah, Annie..." Caleb murmurs, that look of sad sympathy softening even further as he reaches to gently wipe at the corner of her eye with his thumb. He's never liked to see her cry; she recounts more than one occasion being wrapped up in Caleb's arms while he hushed and reassured her that all would be well. He's always been strong like that for her, and so comes the responsibility to do the same for him now. It's a daunting thing.

"I'm sorry," she whispers in a voice thick with tears, because much louder and she knows that she will sound shaky.

She's got to be better right now, for all their sake, and so she wipes her eyes and forces herself to be just a little bit stronger. 

"Sorry," she repeats, steadier as her head shakes and wisps of brown hair brush across her rosy cheeks. She's collected her thoughts as best she can, and it's now that she remembers Ben's presence; he's made himself so still and so silent, she had nearly forgotten altogether.

Caleb's eyes are already on him now, and she follows in kind. Ben himself is looking anywhere but at the two of them, shoulders squared in rigid tension as he fidgets with the hilt of his sword. They’re all safe here now, but he’s grappling with something unseen. He does that too often, she thinks, fights too many demons all on his own.

"Ben," Anna says in a quiet voice, and he visibly swallows, looking at the ground next to her before meeting her gaze. He obliges her unspoken prompt for an explanation, blue eyes flickering as he seems to collect his thoughts.

“We were fired upon,” he says, and Anna’s spine goes ramrod straight as it suddenly occurs to her that Abraham is not in the tent. Ben shakes his head, quickly goes on, “Abe’s alright. He’s nearly unconscious, and I’ve nowhere proper to keep him so--”

“He’s in the barn,” Caleb snorts, squeezing Anna’s hand gently. He sounds absolutely exhausted. 

Anna nods slowly and looks back to Ben, brows drawn up in a fine line. “And what of his father?”

There’s silence now, oppressive like the sweltering heat of Setauket in the summertime. She takes it for what it is, and her mouth opens slightly in shock. 

_Oh, God, no…_

“The judge’s body has been wrapped; he’s with Abraham now,” Ben confirms lowly, looking a bit like he’s forcing himself to hold eye contact and a bit more like he is going to be crushed underneath the weight of the falling sky. 

She knows this side of him too well and not at all; he’s easy and impossible to read like this, in the sense that she knows he’s breaking down in front of her but she will never know how badly. Still, that is a secondary concern.

Anna’s head whirls in a daze. She looks between Ben and Caleb, one of them finally flinching away and the other hardly conscious, the both of them eclipsed in their separate pains and fatigues. They are two sides of the same coin. Always have been. 

“Go an’ see him,” Caleb urges in a murmur, copper eyes glassy as he insists again, “I’ll be alright.”

She nearly protests on reflex, but she sees the way he eyes Ben and she knows that she can do nothing more for either of them. Anna takes Caleb’s hand in both of hers, feels her chest hollow out as she squeezes with a ferocious love that she _knows_ he understands, and then she’s rising. 

And if she sees Ben wipe at his eyes as she steps out, she doesn’t say anything.

* * *

Ben’s cracking, coming apart at the seams and the best of it is, he’s got to pretend not to be. With _everything_ exploding around him lately, he simply cannot afford to buckle and crash to the earth the way the universe seems to want. 

For one thing, the army surely can’t afford it either, and for another, it wouldn’t be fair to Caleb.

Not now, not when he’s here barely clinging to consciousness, bloody and shaking like his poor Uncle Lucas. Ben feels guilty immediately for drawing the comparison even in the privacy of his subconscious, and he swipes inconspicuously at his eyes as Anna ducks out of the tent.

God, what can he say now? 

It was one thing to meticulously choose his words and lay out a factual account of what occurred, almost like he was talking to George Washington and not Anna Strong, but oh, this is another. 

Is he meant to apologize? He should. 

He could have acted faster, could have been more prepared, could have taken more precautions to have stopped this in the first place, and now he’s robbed both Abe and Caleb of things irreplaceable; he _should_ apologize, and he knows this, but knowing doesn’t make it any easier to choke the words out. 

“It ain’t your fault, Ben,” Caleb says after an indistinct stretch of silence, voice light albeit scratchy; it’s a simple assertion, delivered not like a consolation but rather a reminder. Ben can appreciate that much, at least, because he is absolutely the last among them deserving of comfort now or ever.

“I’d have done something quicker, if I’d known,” he replies anyway, halfway insistent like he’s expecting Caleb not to believe him. It’s silly, and perhaps that is why he doesn’t stop staring at the floor while he says it. 

Ben’s heart crawls into his throat, constricting, and he suffers a physical pain as he breathes. He thinks of Valley Forge, briefly, with its kiss of death that delivered so many men away from this war; it’s impossible not to envy them, if only for the rarest and most fleeting of moments.

“I know.” 

Caleb sounds like he means that. That’s something to hold onto, at least, maybe for the both of them. Why, then, do his eyes sear and blur so suddenly?

“Would you look at me, Tallmadge?” It sounds partly like a request and more like a simple prompt. It sounds a little like he’s wondering if Ben even _can_ look at him. 

He’s not sure if he can, but he does.

He’s blinking away the blurriness swimming across his vision, and Caleb just looks back at him with something he’d call pity if he didn’t know better. There might be another, subtler message now, and without second-guessing it, Ben moves. 

For a bit there it’d felt like he no longer knew how, like he was turning to marble, so it’s somewhat relieving that he manages to ease down into a chair by the cot. Ben puts too much focus into the second that it takes to reach down and shift his scabbard out of the way.

“This should never have happened,” Ben says suddenly, and fuck, isn’t it useless? He came up short before and he’s doing exactly the same now as he struggles to grasp the right words. It doesn’t matter, and neither do Ben’s apologies and his failures to apologize, so he might as well say it all. 

“I was trying to be careful, to get everything exactly right, but…” he continues, wavering and heavy with grief, “but it wasn’t enough, not for you or for the magistrate.” He ends sounding like such a bitter thing, sharp-edged and seething with cold, constricted wrath.

Caleb’s quiet now, and Ben stares at the canvas of the tent. He’s angry ( _furious_ ) and embarrassed ( _ashamed_ ) and he knows those aren’t the right things to be. The right thing to be is _quiet,_ supportive, like he hasn’t been in a long time. Since before the war or longer than that, even. 

“Guess not,” Caleb concedes eventually, because he’s always been honest. It stings Ben about as much as he appreciates it. “But there was nothin’ else to be done. I know that, an’ so do you.”

It’s blunt but it gets the point across, and more than that it’s true. 

None of them could have really known how these cursed cards would fall; it’s true that Ben has warned Caleb off of the London Trade, and it’s true that Ben knew there was risk of Arnold playing dirty. It’s _just_ as true that Caleb couldn’t have foreseen such an outright betrayal, that Ben hadn’t the faintest idea that Simcoe is now Arnold-adjacent, and that he had arranged for Caleb’s return very promptly, all things considered. 

All of these things are true, then, and Ben does get around to pulling his head on as straight as it can be. He’s got to stop being Major Tallmadge now, just for a moment, just right here. 

“There he is,” murmurs Caleb, and it gets Ben to look at him. He’s almost smiling, and it unwinds some of the barbed wire coiled tight in Ben’s chest. 

All of the hard edges and sharp corners seem to soften out, and his eyes water dangerously as he lets it all _go_. In the wake of it, more than anything, more than the guilt or grief, he is so desperately relieved that Caleb is here with him now.

And just for a moment, just right here, he can breathe again. 

* * *

It’s hard to describe, the look on Abraham’s face.

_Haunted,_ her mind supplies. Haunted, is one word for it.

She’s already tried her luck speaking to him, once, twice, but he’s somewhere far off. His eyes are steely and distant, settled on some indistinct phantom unseen to her. Thusly, she’s settled herself quietly by his side, keeping her eyes off of the Judge’s body wrapped not four meters away. 

She expects that Abe will come out of this trance sooner rather than later, and he will be forced to reckon with the emotions which presently lie dormant. He will have to reckon with the corpse of his father -- and so will she. She will grieve, genuinely though perhaps not fully, because at the end of it, she had loved Judge Woodhull. 

Still, it isn’t her grief that matters right now.

It’s Abe’s, and it’s Caleb’s, and maybe it’s even Ben’s. They’re lost, breaking, and drowning respectively, though she suspects that all three words could apply to each of them. What is she, then? What is her role in this grand tailspin?

“It’s not much use,” mutters Abe eventually, and Anna immediately blinks out of the haze of her subconscious, “thinking about things that you can’t change.” 

It’s not something that sounds like it ought to be coming out of Abe’s mouth. 

He isn’t often so plainly honest these days, or even honest at all, but these words seem to come out of a dark fog. She’s not even sure that he knows properly what he’s saying, if he’ll remember later that he said it at all. Anna’s watching his face carefully, tenderly, but it seems as though not a muscle has moved; his eyes haven’t wavered, glassy and unflinching like he’s holding a staring contest with a dead man. 

“You’ve still got to wonder, though, what you could’ve done differently.” His voice is so quiet, and he’s so still. “What if I’d just been in front of him? Or if I’d told him to get down. I could’ve done a lot of things.”

She feels a stinging pressure manifest itself against her chest, as if she can take on some of this weight-of-the-world burden and grant Abe some reprieve. She knows that it doesn’t work that way. If it did, then she’d already have willingly broken her own back by now.

“But I didn’t.” He sounds more resolute now, like this is the one thing that he can be sure of. “I didn’t.” He nods softly to himself, nearly imperceptible but there all the same. He’s cracked some distorted puzzle suspended within the confines of his deep subconscious, and now he’s letting go, sinking into the quicksands of oblivion. 

“Rest, Abraham,” she says softly, because there is nothing to be done for him now. She grips one of his hands in her own, though she does not squeeze this one tightly; Abe needs no reminder that she loves him, only that she’s here to keep him tethered to the Earth. 

He looks at her now, briefly and sparingly. He seems to find some sort of peace, or at least something like it, because in the next moment, he closes his eyes, and he sleeps.

She expects that when he wakes next, the fall from grace will be neither kind nor forgiving for any of them. 


End file.
